Russian tycoon dies after apparent fall from hotel window

Russian magnate Pavel Antov was found dead this week at his hotel in the Indian state of Odisha, according to Russia’s Tass News Agency.

According to Indian media reports, Antov died after he fell from a third-floor window at his hotel on Sunday.

His death comes just days after another Russian he was traveling with was also found dead. His travel companion, Vladimir Budanov, reportedly died at the same hotel on Friday.

Police Superintendent Vivekanand Sharma said that Budanov suffered a stroke and that Antov “was depressed after [his friend’s] death” and died by suicide. Sharma told Indian news outlet The Hindu that officials cremated Antov’s body on Monday with the permission of his family.

“A tourist group of four was resting at a hotel in Rayagad. Last Thursday, Russian Vladimir B. died. According to the police, the cause of this was a heart attack. Last Saturday, a second Russian, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir Region, Pavel Antov, fell out of the window. We are closely monitoring investigation and [getting]  all the information from the Odisha police,” Tass reported.

The Russian Consul in Calcutta Alexei Idamkin told Tass that the police did not see a “criminal element” in the two deaths.

The BBC reported that Antov had criticized the Russian missile strikes in Ukraine last June on WhatsApp, saying that “it’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”

He later said the message was a result of a “technical error.”

Antov, who was featured on Forbes’s list of the richest Russian lawmakers in 2019, is the latest in a slew of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s critics to die under mysterious circumstances.

Another Putin critic, the chairman of Russia’s largest private oil company, Ravil Maganov, died after allegedly falling out of a hospital window in September, according to Russian news outlets.

Ivan Pechorin, the managing director of the Far East and Arctic Development Corporation and a point man for Putin on the development of the Arctic, died after falling off his boat in September.

Pechorin’s death came months after his former boss, Igor Nosov, died from a sudden stroke at the age of 43 in February.